After further deliberation, I decided to hold off of further experiments with PC-BSD, largely because I prefer Gnome. Reading this thread on the PC-BSD forum made it clear that PC-BSD is unequivocally KDE-centric:

I had in fact tried installing Gnome on a FreeBSD v7beta partition of my laptop in December but the package repositories seemed in transition and various key files couldn't be found. I resolved to try again once the final v7 has been released and things have settled down.

Just curious: what is your experience with Flash? Does v9 work on your Thinkpad? Personally I detest a lot of Flash, especially the animated banners, but once in awhile I want to see a clip of something, on YouTube or somewhere. In such cases, there is no point in being a total purist.